Michigan Vamp

My Old License Plate

Eccentric Night Owl

Quote from Blood Read

"An ambiguously coded figure, a source of both erotic anxiety and corrupt desire, the literary vampire is one of the most powerful archetypes bequeathed to us from the imagination of the nineteenth century."~ page 2 introduction to Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture

Intellectual Vampire Quote

"If the vampire is an other, he or she was always a figure in whom one could find one's self...the despicable as well as the defiant, the shameful as well as the unashamed, the loathing of oddness as well as pride in it."~ Richard Dyer

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Thursday, October 20, 2011

Thank you Roxanne for inviting me to your blog today. I’m excited to be here. The theme is Halloween and I spent a long drive home contemplating what I’d write. Halloween means a lot of things to me: candy, spooky stories, and dress up, to name a few, but I think the thing I love the most about it is the mood. I’m not talking horror movies and gore—I’m not really a big fan of that, I tend to scare easily—I’m talking about the sense of dark mystery.

The car ride home, alone, in the dark, was what sparked this. The day had been warm, the last dying burst of summer. With a beautiful clear sky the evening’s chill had nothing to stop it from sweeping in as soon as twilight fell and fog now sat, coiled, in the low-lying areas of the country road. It curled up from the ditches on either side, slithering ethereal tendril across the asphalt that caught in my headlight and tore apart as I passed through.

The light from the crescent moon cast deep shadows among the countryside. Fields of yet-to-be harvested corn stood sentinel to my left, tall enough to hide a man or monster. Trees to my right reached naked branches toward them. If I was on foot, perhaps on horseback (in my writing time period of choice—faux Renaissance), I’d feel the bite of the wind, carrying the promise of winter only a month or so away. The branches would creak, the dying leaves scratching and hissing against each other. The corn would also rattle, the dead dry stalking standing only because they haven’t realized their season was over.

In this darkness and the dry rattle of death yet unrealized hide those things we don’t want to acknowledge but can’t deny. Evil, maliciousness, struggle, torment, and the inevitable end. They carry with them questions we can’t answer or, even worse, answers we fear. And just as I prefer music in a minor key, I’m drawn to these questions, to the sense of heavy darkness and what lies beyond.

The road sweeps up and around a curve and cutting through the fog and the darkness is a glimmer of warm light. It’s small but certain. A modest beacon on a white house at the end of a long laneway offering welcome and the promise that good lies within the deepest night.

I suppose this reveals I’m a romantic at heart. Even on the darkest night, with the darkest monsters watching, there is hope—this hope is one of the themes I write over and over again. This little anecdote certainly shows how susceptible I am to mood and imagery. It probably means I shouldn’t be taking the back roads home after dark once fall hits.

Don’t get me wrong, I love bright sunny images and moods, too. But there’s just something about a foggy Halloween night that excites the storyteller in me.

Twenty-year-old Ward de’Ath expected this to be a simple job—bring a nobleman’s daughter back from the dead for fifteen minutes, let her family say good-bye, and launch his fledgling career as a necromancer. Goddess knows he can’t be a surgeon—the Quayestri already branded him a criminal for trying—so bringing people back from the dead it is.

But when Ward wakes the beautiful Celia Carlyle, he gets more than he bargained for. Insistent that she’s been murdered, Celia begs Ward to keep her alive and help her find justice. By the time she drags him out her bedroom window and into the sewers, Ward can’t bring himself to break his damned physician’s Oath and desert her.

However, nothing is as it seems—including Celia. One second, she’s treating Ward like sewage, the next she’s kissing him. And for a nobleman’s daughter, she sure has a lot of enemies. If he could just convince his heart to give up on the infuriating beauty, he might get out of this alive…

Melanie has always been drawn to story telling and can't remember a time whenshe wasn’t creating a story in her head. Her early stories were adventures withfairies and dragons and sword swinging princesses.

Today she continues to spin tales of magic in lands near and far, while her cat sitson the edge of her desk and supervises. When she’s not writing, you can find herpretending to be other people with her local community theatre groups.

That gave me chills. I'd have to say my favorite mood it happy, joking, family and friend mood. Could be caused from excessive alcohol, or not. Can't rule out a good spine tingled in a book though. Love it.

I love calm, peaceful but yet a bit of mystery to my mood. I will sometimes go walking through my local cemetery just to get that feeling. Makes my mind wander into the unknown and it gets me interested in my surrounding history. I probably sound dark and demented saying I like to wander around cemetery's but that's ok I guess I am a little. It's just so peaceful and calm. Put's things in perspective.

I'm a snow bunny, so my favorite is looking out in the dark of night when there's a thick layer of fresh snow and the moon is shining through bare trees that look more like skeletal remains than something that's just asleep for the season. The moonlight sparkles merrily on the snow, but in the dead grip of the trees, you can feel something watching.

I love calm, peaceful but yet a bit of mystery to my mood. I will sometimes go walking through my local cemetery just to get that feeling. Makes my mind wander into the unknown and it gets me interested in my surrounding history. I probably sound dark and demented saying I like to wander around cemetery's but that's ok I guess I am a little. It's just so peaceful and calm. Put's things in perspective.

P.s. I would like to be entered in the contest. If I didn't mention before.